Send MM slide images to PowerPoint

The MindManager 15 webinar preview demonstration of new features included a facility for automatic slide creation.

As per MM 14 these slides can be exported to PowerPoint as bullet points or as PowerPoint slide objects, but there is still no facility to export the actual MM slide images. The bullet point option is obviously useful if you want to apply formatting within PowerPoint. I think the slide object export is less useful; while it generates a tree-like graphic the default PP layout is ugly and the formatting options are limited.

In theory you can edit the PP slide objects so the slides look more like the original MM slides but it takes a lot of work and the results are average at best. Andrew Wilcox came up with a great workaround to use the jpg images which MM generates when you export to the web to paste into slides but this also takes a bit of work.

It would be much simpler if jpg images of the slides themselves could be exported to PowerPoint. All that is required would be an additional option in the PowerPoint export dialogue box to do this.

I would be happy with just that. However an ideal approach would be to include a sub-option under a new "export as jpg" option to generate and include in the export a jpg of the Gantt chart (and if possible the ability to export just the Gantt chart by itself as well).

I have just discovered a partial answer to this problem that has been hiding in plain sight - using image printing software. These programs work in similar ways to PDF printers, only they can create multiple JPG files which can then be imported into PowerPoint using its Insert Photo Album command. This approach draws on a method I have described previously which was based in turn on Andrew Wilcox's initial brainwave to use MM's ability to create JPEGs when maps are exported to the Web.

I believe I've come up with a much simpler alternative which I have described in more detail here. I still think this is something that MM should be able to do by itself, though some of the imager printers on the market could be used as a basis to achieve this.